Ca Balà magazine logo-mascotte

Ca Balà was an independent, self-produced magazine of graphic humour and political satire, published from April 1971 to January 1980, for a total of 50 issues, monthly or quarterly. It was founded in Compiobbi (Florence, Italy) by Graziano Braschi, Berlinghiero Buonarroti and Paolo Della Bella, members of the art collective Gruppo Stanza. The Florentine writer Piero Santi was its first editor and suggested its name, taking inspiration from a Venetian street called 'Fondamenta Ca Balà'. 

On 10 July 1966, Graziano Braschi drew his Omino che si guarda dentro (Little Man Who Looks Inside Himself), destined to become the magazine's symbol. It was first published in the book-object Settantuno (1968), printed in silkscreen in 90 copies. The mascot later appeared in the first issue of Tèchne (October 1969), a magazine conceived by visual poet Eugenio Miccini as a laboratory for verbo-visual experimentation within the Italian post-war avant-garde. On that occasion, Gruppo Stanza published nine pages of texts and drawings, and it was Miccini himself who provided the lithographic plates, which were later printed in offset. The page with the Omino [FIGURE 12], drawn by Braschi directly on paper with a biro, gained a more "vibrant" quality compared to the original draft, precisely due to the medium used.

Following the lesson of Ca Balà's two tutelary deities, Sigmund Freud and André Breton, the Omino was an expression of introspection and of that scatological-inspective impulse to "look inside" through the buttocks—an act meant to unleash the individual spirit through humour, understood as a "real political weapon", an expression of social revolt and spiritual independence. The author defines his Omino as "thin, without depth, of uncertain line, and with the unlikely position of the asterisk-shaped anus (and thank goodness that the imagination of computer scientists had not yet discovered the smiley face!)"¹. He adds: "Someone asked me, ‘But where did you get your inspiration?’ I simply don't know. I later learned that, around the early 1960s, a publication appeared featuring drawings by Maurice Henry, Les 32 Positions de l’Androgyne [FIGURE 10], but I never saw it. Was I caught up in the atmosphere of Surrealism? You decide. The slogan that has always accompanied the Omino is an important one: ‘A profound gaze’. An introspective look, precisely"². 

The Omino's first appearance in the magazine was in issue no. 3 (June 1971) [FIGURE 14], in a panel by Braschi. He then reappeared in no. 14 (May 1972), commenting on the political elections that favoured moderate and right-wing parties; here, the exclamation "I SEE BLACK!" [FIG. 15] refers to the noir humour so dear to the magazine’s founders. It was in issue no. 17/18 (August–September 1972) that the Omino officially became the magazine’s mascot and was included in the header, where he remained until the final issue.

Buonarroti traces the mascot’s inspirational origins to a newspaper clipping kept by Braschi in his archive. The clipping included a photograph later published in the single issue of L’io boia (1979), a supplement to Ca Balà, with the caption: "Florence: the editorial staff of Ca Balà improvising a happening in Piazza della Signoria to sell a few extra copies"‭³ [FIGURE 13].

Buonarroti also reconstructs the genealogy of the symbol, tracing some archaic antecedents in the books of the salms, the Salters (c. 1250-1259) [FIGURES 1-2]. Since then, precursors of the Omino appeared throughout art history in the works of various authors [FIGURES 3-10], including Hieronymus Bosch, Jacques Callot, Maurice Henry, Toulouse-Lautrec—testimony to a shared, recurring, and timeless imagery. This imagery underpins the Omino’s fame and his irreverent, revolutionary charge, still relevant today. Therefore, if satire, "by its very nature, is so ephemeral that it is content to live l'espace d'un matin, as it is always inevitably absorbed by the latest event"⁴‬, then the Omino che si guarda dentro becomes the emblem of humour and its lasting relevance—"a thin thread that acts in depth, disrupting established convictions through the surreal jolt of imagination"⁵.

From 1966 to the present day, there have been many instances of citation, homage, and plagiarism of the symbol, reinterpreted by various artists [FIGURES 11, 17–27], including: in France, Cabu, Jean Dubuffet, Laurent Sourisseau (aka Riss), and Georges Wolinski; in the United States, Robert Crumb; and in Italy, Altan, Renato Ciavola, Dariush, and Ettore Sottsass.

Lastly, the Omino also appeared on two occasions in the weekly satirical magazine Il Male (1978–1982), which emerged from the Ca Balà experience.

NOTES:

¹ Paolo Della Bella, Laura Monaldi, Claudia Paterna,  Uno sguardo profondo. Viaggio nello humour e nella satira, Edizioni Cadmo 2018, p. 2.
² Berlinghiero Buonarroti, Ca Balà: L’Umorismo come arma politica, Humour Mon Amour - Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, Florence 2019, p. 90.
‭³ Therein, p. 100.
⁴‬ Therein, p. 3.
⁵ Therein, text on the back cover.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES:

• Berlinghiero Buonarroti, Ca Balà: L’Umorismo come arma politica, Humour Mon Amour - Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, Florence 2019;
• Paolo Della Bella, Laura Monaldi, Claudia Paterna, Uno sguardo profondo. Viaggio nello humour e nella satira, Edizioni Cadmo 2018;
• Centro Studi Politico Sociale / Archivio Storico “Il Sessantotto”, Firenze (Political and Social Studies Center / Historical Archives “Il Sessantotto”, Florence).